Anti-catholicism was part of MA in colonial times. In 1647, the commonwealth banned Jesuits or other priests from being in the colony. In 1688, Ann Glover was executed not because she was a witch, but because she was Catholic. In 1750, chief justice of MA Paul Dudley endowed four annual lectures at Harvard; he mandated that be involved in “the detecting and convicting and exposing the idolatry of the Romish church, their tyranny, usurpations, damnable heresies, fatal errors, abominable superstitions, and other crying wickedness in their high places”
Until the 19th century graduates of the College of the Holy Cross in MA were actually conferred degrees by Georgetown, since the Congregationalists would not charter a Catholic (and Jesuit) college. What’s more, MA banned the celebration of Christmas as popery.
Catholicism was banned in Maryland 1688. John Jay called for a loyalty oath for public officers to abjure foreign ecclesiasticl leadership.
I think that Catholicism fared worse in colonies/states which were influenced by Puritans.
However, once the Irish took over Boston politics in the late 19th Century, they ruled it as their own petty fiefdom. From the 1880s until the 1950s, the great power struggle in Massachusetts was between the Boston Irish Dem Machine (and their Jewish, French Canadian and Portuguese allies elsewhere in the state) and the Yankee Republicans (and their Italian allies).